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[ Silence ] [ Music ] >> This used to be Church of England Primary School, set as you can see in lovely Kent woodland in a part

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the country which is still relatively peaceful and unstressed. But now this unimposing building houses an establishment which is unique in the English-speaking world. For this is Keston College which studies every aspect of religious life in the eastern bloc and monitors the persecution of Christians and other religious groups behind the Iron Curtain. The Soviet press accuse it of

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subversive activities while the European press rely on it as almost the only source of accurate information on the state of spiritual life under communist rule. Here a staff of 20 headed by the founder the Reverend Michael Bordeaux make contact with Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and East Germany, Hungary and the USSR and their painstaking and objective reporting on the horrors

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of religious persecution have won them worldwide respect. It seems that we in the West have been lulled by a false sense of security about our brothers behind the Iron Curtain. We've been subjected to what the professionals call misinformation. How many times have you heard or read about visitors to the USSR for example who've come back and said well the

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churches are functioning normally and Christians are allowed to go about their normal everyday business? Well here at Keston College they know that's very far from the truth. The present regime and Mr. Chernyanko, is making it even harder for Christians and other freethinkers to live in peace. They are rearresting Christians on trumped-up charges after only two or three weeks of freedom,

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and some Christians they're keeping indefinitely in prison. Alena Khodzhevnikov is responsible for the information department here at Keston. Alena, is this new anti-religious emphasis making it harder for you to gather information? Yes, it definitely is, because since the plenum in June of last year,

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there has been more restrictive legislation introduced in the Soviet Union, and obviously that makes it more difficult for people to pass on documents or even verbal information, because they are liable to criminal prosecution. What are the main sources of your information?

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Obviously, part of it is personal contacts. someone, let's say hypothetically a foreigner, may be in the Soviet Union and he will be asked, "When you return to the West, please advise Keston College that such and such has happened." A lot of the information comes out in written form, called samizdat,

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that's documents which are circulated unofficially. That's what the word "samizdat" means. Yes, in the Soviet Union, and this samizdat does find its way to the West. I would say it's a combination of unofficial and official.

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A lot of our information, people don't realize this, is in fact culled from reading the official Soviet press and the press of the other communist countries we study. So we look at the unofficial information, the official, and put it together. How does that work? Can you give me an illustration?

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Well, it's a bit of a jigsaw puzzle. For example, recently there was a visit by 255, I think, Americans, Christians from America in the Soviet Union, right? Now, the delegation visited, they were given the official tour, incense, caviar, everything was laid on, and they came back, and the leaders of this American delegation praised it highly,

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burgeoning religious life, no signs of any kind of suppression. And then we get letters from individuals who are in that delegation saying that this is disgraceful. This is a cover-up. We saw people being hauled out of churches who tried to approach us.

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We saw people in churches unfurling banners saying there is no freedom of religion in this country or words to that effect. So there you have the official and the unofficial. I am sure that in a month or two there will be samizdat documents coming from Christians in the Soviet Union reacting to this American visit and giving their views on it because

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everyone listens to foreign radio of course in the Soviet Union and they'll know about this. There have just been two conflicting reports about Zakharov, haven't there? An Italian reporter said that he was dead and Keston College have just put out the information

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that he's being treated in a psychiatric hospital with mind-changing drugs. I mean, how are we to know which piece of information is correct? In a case like this, one can never be 100% certain. A society that practices comprehensive censorship,

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well, you know, you just can't go back to them and say, "Tell us, is this true about Sakharov?" There's always a possibility of error. But in this case, specifically, we knew the source from whom we got this information.

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source that's been very reliable in the past. So in this instance we had no hesitation in issuing the information. Sometimes you may get a samizdat document, for example, some of them are unsigned. It could be employed by the KGB, it could have been deliberately floated to the West

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as part of the general KGB policy of disinformation. But after a while you develop a sort of a gut feeling. Some information is actually sent to you, isn't it? Is it possible to see some of these unofficial documents?

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Yes, of course. Our archive is unique and I'll show them to you. Thanks. Is this some of the material that you get through them?

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Yes, I think this is one of the more interesting examples of samizdat that we have. As you see, it's written out on strips of a bed sheet of varying lengths. Now this is an entire transcript of a trial of a young believer. It's very meticulously compiled.

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As you see, it's almost like reading a play. You have what the judge says, what the witness replies, and so on. It was quite a remarkable collective effort. Why was it written on cloth?

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Because the person who brought this document out to the West wrapped it around his body, Egyptian mummy style. That was before the days they were so thorough in their body searches at Soviet airports. That I should think, actually, is why it's a varying length.

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You know, one lot around his leg and another one around his middle, and you needed two in one place. You couldn't put it all in one place. That's right.

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How fascinating. And this is a book, actually, which has the contents of that in English translation. Aida is the name of the girl. What happened to her?

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She served her sentence and was released and at the moment she's living quietly with her children. As far as we know she, well she has been under surveillance on and off, but she's not been seriously harassed since she finished her sentence.

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It's very hard for us in the West I think to understand what it's like to be persecuted in this way. Can you help us to see what it would be like for an ordinary Christian family living in these sort of conditions?

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Yes, there's one thing that I always find very disturbing when this question of persecution comes up, is that we in the West tend to say, 'Oh yes, isn't it marvellous how their faith is growing under persecution?'

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Almost as if persecution is a good thing and something to be encouraged. Persecution is a terrible thing. There's nothing at all good or uplifting in persecution as such. It's not sort of sanitised suffering,

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as you see in Hollywood epics about early martyrs. Persecution to the Christian, the Christian who wants to live out the gospel in the Soviet Union, means a whole range of pressures, from the abstract,

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the pure psychological pressure that you're a second-class citizen, to downright physical repression. There's nothing uplifting, say, to have your child, your small six-year-old son, say, coming home from school with a broken arm

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because somebody has beaten him up, because the family is a Christian one. There's nothing uplifting about that at all. But they can worship, okay, can't they? Well, they can worship, but that's about all they can do

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within the four walls of a registered state-owned church. But even there, the quality of the worship is diluted, because, for example, priests or ministers or whoever have to submit their sermons for scrutiny, you know, just in case there's something there.

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One priest, in fact, who was recently imprisoned, one of the charges against him was that he spoke about the second coming of Christ, and he was accused of spreading delusion among the masses. So, really, you know, any attempt to live out a Christian life just ends up in trouble. husband can be in prison, for example, the wife will find herself with kids to support,

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suffering secondary persecution, and there's no state help of any kind for prisoners' families. Is there any difference in the quality of faith that you've noticed between the Christians in the East and the Christians in the West? Their faith has been distilled to its basic essentials. I tried to explain to one Christian

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a very active Christian in the Soviet Union, who asked me, "Why don't the Western churches intercede more on our behalf? Why doesn't the World Council of Churches do something, or organizations like that?"

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And I took the role of devil's advocate and said, "Well, you know, they have contacts with the church leaders here and so on." And she said, "For heaven's sake, why?" I said, "Well, their excuse is that they, by these contacts,

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are stopping the church here in Russia from being totally destroyed." And she looked at me like this, and she said, "Good heavens!" She said, "How little faith your Western churchmen must have!" She said, "The church is the body of Christ.

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It cannot be destroyed by any human agency." "So why are you..." She said, "You've all got nothing to do," she said, "if you can sit around and think silly things like that." And to me, it sounded like good sense.

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- Michael Bordeaux, you've been deeply concerned with the church behind the Iron Curtain for 25 years or more now. Do you find that your concern is shared

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by the rest of us in the West? Are we doing enough? - We simply do not care enough, because we don't know enough.

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And traditionally, missions in this country have been concerned with Africa and with Asia. There is absolutely no tradition whatsoever for being involved in any way with Eastern Europe.

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But secondly, there is the theological implication of this. The theology of persecution is something which is there in the New Testament. St. Paul said, "The church is the body of Christ,

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"and if one limb of the body suffers, "the whole body suffers." We all know that quotation. We do absolutely nothing about it,

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and I find this deeply disturbing. It really means that our concept of Christianity in the world today, which is partly that of a suffering church has gone out of the window and the whole of Christian theology

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and the ethos of our world outlook is distorted by that. We need to bring back this element. But in practical terms, what can ordinary Christians in the West do? We need to be informed, but we don't at the moment care enough even to get the information. Therefore one has to be involved with the work of Keston College. We have the only organisation

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which is actually providing the basic information which should lead to prayer. And then prayer leads on to practical action. The local support groups of Keston College round and about the country, there are a growing number of them, there's still room for more,

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they are spearheading the practical application of what I've been saying in organizing letter-writing campaigns to prisoners, to the relatives of prisoners, to the prison camp officials, to the Soviet government, to the Soviet embassy in this country. We would like to see this happening much more. Real bombardment of letters. And

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you might ask, aren't we making the situation worse? No, it is they who have taken the decision. They want us to write them. They're asking us to write, and we're only responding to their request. [BLANK_AUDIO]

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